The British cinema produced so many war films in the forties, fifties and sixties that one might have thought that the supply of suitable subjects would have dried up, and indeed such films have, since around 1970, not been as popular as they once were. Film-makers do, however, occasionally succeed in finding new wartime subjects, and "Enigma" is one such example. It is a fictitious account of the work of the British code-breakers based at Bletchley Park. The story is set in March 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height and the key priority for the code-breakers was to crack the "shark" cipher used by the German Navy to communicate with its U-Boats. (The title derives from the Enigma machines used by the Nazis to encode messages).
The main character is cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, a brilliant but eccentric Cambridge mathematician loosely based on Alan Turing. As the film opens, Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park after recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork and an unhappy love affair. Jericho's former lover Claire has mysteriously gone missing, and he enlists the help of her housemate Hester to try and track her down. In the course of their search they discover that she was responsible for the theft of classified documents and begin to suspect that she might have been working for the Germans.
The film has been criticised on two counts. One is that it does not mention Turing's vital work in cracking the code, replacing him with the fictional Jericho. This may have been down to financial considerations; Turing was gay whereas Jericho is heterosexual, and the filmmakers may have felt that a film with a gay hero would not do well at the box-office. On the other hand, they may simply have wanted to remain faithful to Robert Harris' source novel. The other commonly voiced criticism was of the storyline in which the real traitor turns out to be a Pole who is betraying Allied military secrets to the Nazis because of anger over the Katyn massacre in which his brother died. This also struck me as an unlikely development; the German occupation of Poland was so brutal that no Pole, however great his resentment of Stalin, would have been likely to have collaborated with the Nazis. In actual fact, there were no known German agents working at Bletchley Park; the only spy there was the notorious John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge spy ring, who was working for the Soviet Union, not Germany.
Dougray Scott is good as Jericho, a seedy, slightly unbalanced genius, and Jeremy Northam is also good as the suave but sinister upper-class MI5 agent Wigram. This is not, however, really one of Kate Winslet's better films, and she seems miscast as the plain, dowdy bluestocking Hester. She may have taken the role under the influence of the belief, common in the early 2000s, that a physically attractive actress will not be taken seriously in her profession unless she has made at least one film in which she plays a physically unattractive character. (See also Charlize Theron in "Monster" or Nicole Kidman in "The Hours").
The plot, as is usual with spy thrillers, is a highly complex one, and at times difficult to follow. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, may be one of Britain's greatest playwrights, but I find that his talents often work better in the theatre than in the cinema. "Enigma" does, however, succeed in conveying a good sense of the atmosphere of wartime Britain, a mixture of fear, paranoia about the enemy and patriotic enthusiasm. 6/10
The main character is cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, a brilliant but eccentric Cambridge mathematician loosely based on Alan Turing. As the film opens, Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park after recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork and an unhappy love affair. Jericho's former lover Claire has mysteriously gone missing, and he enlists the help of her housemate Hester to try and track her down. In the course of their search they discover that she was responsible for the theft of classified documents and begin to suspect that she might have been working for the Germans.
The film has been criticised on two counts. One is that it does not mention Turing's vital work in cracking the code, replacing him with the fictional Jericho. This may have been down to financial considerations; Turing was gay whereas Jericho is heterosexual, and the filmmakers may have felt that a film with a gay hero would not do well at the box-office. On the other hand, they may simply have wanted to remain faithful to Robert Harris' source novel. The other commonly voiced criticism was of the storyline in which the real traitor turns out to be a Pole who is betraying Allied military secrets to the Nazis because of anger over the Katyn massacre in which his brother died. This also struck me as an unlikely development; the German occupation of Poland was so brutal that no Pole, however great his resentment of Stalin, would have been likely to have collaborated with the Nazis. In actual fact, there were no known German agents working at Bletchley Park; the only spy there was the notorious John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge spy ring, who was working for the Soviet Union, not Germany.
Dougray Scott is good as Jericho, a seedy, slightly unbalanced genius, and Jeremy Northam is also good as the suave but sinister upper-class MI5 agent Wigram. This is not, however, really one of Kate Winslet's better films, and she seems miscast as the plain, dowdy bluestocking Hester. She may have taken the role under the influence of the belief, common in the early 2000s, that a physically attractive actress will not be taken seriously in her profession unless she has made at least one film in which she plays a physically unattractive character. (See also Charlize Theron in "Monster" or Nicole Kidman in "The Hours").
The plot, as is usual with spy thrillers, is a highly complex one, and at times difficult to follow. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, may be one of Britain's greatest playwrights, but I find that his talents often work better in the theatre than in the cinema. "Enigma" does, however, succeed in conveying a good sense of the atmosphere of wartime Britain, a mixture of fear, paranoia about the enemy and patriotic enthusiasm. 6/10